1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a reproduction apparatus and a reproduction method.
2. Description of the Related Art
For compression encoding of image data and audio data, there have been considered various technologies. Presently there is particularly known the MPEG-2 (moving picture experts group 2) method. The transport stream method defined in the MPEG-2 system standard (hereinafter represented as MPEG-2 TS) defines a packet of a fixed length, called a transport stream packet, which is suitable for data transfer in a network or the like and is employed in the digital TV broadcasting.
Also recently there is proposed a technology of recording moving image/audio data based on the MPEG-2 TS (hereinafter called MPEG-2 TS data) on a magnetic tape, a hard disk or a magnetooptical disk.
Also in a system of reproducing multimedia data for example of audio or image, there is disclosed SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) as the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation as the method for defining the reproduction order or the synchronization of plural data. This is based on the XML (extensible markup language), and provides a function of synchronized reproduction of the file by designating an object file utilizing the URI (uniform resource identifiers).
The program information prepared with such SMIL allows to realize various editing and reproducing functions by merely rewriting the content of the program information, without changing the moving image data or audio data recorded on the recording medium.
The moving image or audio data which are not used in the program reproduction can be regarded as unnecessary data. For example, if only a part of the recorded data is used in the program reproduction as a result of editing, other parts become unnecessary. Such unnecessary data, if remaining on the recording medium, will result in a drawback of a lowered efficiency of use of the recording medium.